Category: personal AnGoL

Currently, most of these subsidies are given to universities and professors, who then dole them out to graduate students. One experiment worth trying would be to add a large number of fellowships for graduate education that are awarded directly to promising young undergraduates who are considering further study in science and engineering. If these fellowships were portable, so that the recipient could pursue any course of study at any institution, it would add an interesting new dimension of competition to higher education. It might encourage more innovation, perhaps even the entry of new competitors. After all, it is probably not a sign of health that in the research university business, the United States has not seen a successful new entrant since Stanford and the University of Chicago were founded at the end of the 19th century.

Source: Economic Growth – Paul Romer

The third big meta-idea is the system of science that has turbocharged the pace at which we can now explore the vast number of possibilities that combinatorial explosion offers up. This meta-idea has its roots in the Enlightenment, but it continues to evolve. One important innovation came with the passage of the Morrill Act in the United States in 1862. It invented a new type of university, one that was instructed to focus on “the agricultural and mechanic arts.” (This is why some of these universities still include A&M as part of the name.) This practical focus had important consequences for economic activity. Well into the 20th century, traditional universities in Britain and Germany had stronger basic science in chemistry (and had the Nobel Prizes to prove it.) But new schools of chemical engineering started by two of the Morrill Act universities (Purdue and MIT) helped the United States surge ahead to the worldwide leader of the petrochemical industry.

Source: Economic Growth – Paul Romer

For developing countries, the priority is to find a way to make use of the tested strategies that richer countries have already used to have a higher standard of living. One of the biggest meta-ideas of modern life is to let people live together in dense urban agglomerations. A second is to allow market forces to guide most of the detailed decisions these people make about who they interact with each other. Together, the city and the market let large groups of people cooperate by discovering new ideas, sharing them, and learning from each other. The benefits can show up as a new design for a coffee cup or wages for a worker that grow with experience acquired in jobs with a sequence of employers. People living in a large city cooperate with residents there and through many forms of exchange, with residents in other cities too. Cities connect us all together. China’s growth reflects is rapid embrace of these two big meta-ideas, the market and the city.

Source: Economic Growth – Paul Romer

When I was growing up, I was told to eat my dinner because “children are starving in China.” Then, prospects for China looked dismal, far worse than for Africa, India, or Latin America. The changes that have followed from the opening-up reform in China have astonished everyone. One very positive effect is that people in other countries with low GDP per capita are asking “If China did this, why can’t we?” The challenge for growth theory is to understand why growth in China was so much faster after reform th

Source: Economic Growth – Paul Romer

Prepare for chaos Chaos is a fact of life; hosts fail, engines fail, containers fail and your app can crash. Being properly prepared for “controlled chaos” means that when it happens, it’s not such a big deal. When planning for production it is highly recommended to do it in such a way that you can “kill” any host, any node, at any time so that at least one host can be forced down by sheer brute force and everything will still be fine. Another piece of advice is that if you’re using one of the previously m

Source: Running Docker in Production: three use cases and the good, the bad and the ugly

It’s your job, too.

As a CEO, it is your job to not only create a culture and system conducive to actually making money, but also to lead by example. In my experience, this is where most CEOs fall short. They think they are too good to sell, or that it will tarnish their M.O. as the fearless leader if they bother with something as petty as a sales call.
The Achilles’ heel of the Silicon Valley startup is that people are very good at selling themselves, their vision, their culture, and very bad at selling anything else.
If you are not willing to knock on doors, put your ego aside and hear “no” again and again, and be at the front line of building a relationship with your customer, you’re on a quick path to becoming just another startup or failed company statistic.
In the book I mentioned above, Pink provides a compelling and emotional plea to respect the great art of sales. I respect his work greatly, but I would add a crucial addendum to his thesis. Selling is not just human; it is the life or death of your business.
Source: The Ability to Sell Will Make or Break Your Company, So Stop Underselling It

One policy lesson to be drawn is that convincing low-SES students to enrol in selective universities may not by itself be enough to expand access to top jobs and top incomes. Integrating social networks at these institutions by gender and social background is also important. A number of recent studies (Rao forthcoming, Lowe 2018) provide evidence supporting the ‘contact hypothesis’—that people from different backgrounds become friends when pushed to interact—but results thus far focus on younger children an

Source: How elite universities shape upward mobility | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

Timeout Limits The timeout limit in serverless architecture refers to the amount of time in which you are able to execute your functions. Most serverless architecture providers give a maximum timeout limit of 300 seconds. Anything that needs to run for longer than this, or which takes longer than this to run, is unsuitable for a serverless architecture setup.

Source: Leveraging Serverless Architecture – DZone Cloud

A comparison with medical degree programmes is informative. Medical degrees are similar to elite business degree programmes in that they admit only top-scoring students and in that earnings for those students are very high on average. They differ in that medical students are very unlikely to lead large companies or have incomes in the top 0.1% of the income distribution. As first shown in Hastings et al. (2013), admission to selective medical programmes leads to large earnings gains for low-SES students. In

Source: How elite universities shape upward mobility | VOX, CEPR Policy Portal

But those are vanity concerns — not business ones.  For the business, my pride doesn’t matter.  So I can’t think things like “if I were a good programmer, I’d do this best practice, or defensively code against that, or have a diligence checklist.”  Instead, I have to frame all of those things through the lens of business value and return on investment. To circle back to an earlier theme, is it embarrassing to push something into production that requires us to hand-type dates instead of using a date picker?

Source: How to Write Software: 5 Lessons Learned from Running Businesses